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Is this book great or ghastly? Read my review and get the inside dope

Pyramid Power

Author(s)
G. Pat Flanagan
Publisher
The Author
Edition / Year
1973
In the section labelled

Pyramid Power

This book was not the first to attribute quasi-magical powers to pyramids, but it has been one of the most influential. Since it was first published in 1973 it has been continuously in print. You can, if you have money to waste, purchase it from Amazon today.

One of the reasons for its success is, I suspect, the forcefulness with which Flanagan makes his claims. As he has it:-

Each sentence in this book is a complete thought within itself, and is therefore printed in a format known as Ventilated Prose.

(Italics in original). Match that for pomposity: the term “ventilated prose” was coined by R. Buckminster Fuller to describe his poetry, but as used by Flanagan it means a series of one-sentence paragraphs consisting of bare assertions with little in the way of argument or evidence to back them up, like this sequence which could equally well be printed as a single paragraph, with the added bonus that the book would be less of a waste of paper:-

Czech scientists have been hard at work investigating pyramid power and other forms of “shaped power”.

A Czech engineer, Robert Pavlita has come up with a number of interesting devices he calls “psychotronic generators”.

These devices resemble modern art sculpturings made of metal, wood, and paper.

At least one American scientist has visited Pavlita and examined his generators and could detect no fraud.

It is claimed that the various generators can create mechanical movement, purify water, and attract magnetic and non-magnetic particles, even under water!

The Czechs have been very hush-hush about the devices and have revealed nothing that can be evaluated properly.

(There used to be a very strange web site about Robert Pavlita, still accessible thanks to The Wayback Machine. I cannot resist the temptation to quote from it: “Let us go directly to balls”. Exactly.)

Somehow in Flanagan's mind the most startling claims, no matter how unsubstantiated, have to be believed. Pyramids, he says, preserve food from decay, sharpen razor blades, and make cats vegetarian. The food preservation idea is due to a Frenchman, Antoine Bovis, who observed that organic matter thousands of years old inside the Pyramids of Egypt had failed to decay. He jumped to the conclusion that this effect was due to the shape of the Pyramids rather than any other possible cause. Flanagan adds that:-

One person reports that maggots left meat if a pyramid was placed over the maggot infested meat.

He said that the maggots left and starved to death rather than go back to the meat.

If you have a bullshit meter to hand, you may well notice an abnormally high reading at this point. (The thought occurs that perhaps the maggots had been converted to vegetarianism, in which case surely they should have been provided with some carrots to munch on, rather than callously being allowed to die of hunger.)

Flanagan rounds off his book with an advocacy of the existence of the ether, which he strains to make a viable explanation for the so-called pyramid effect. However it should be noted that much of what he writes is lifted without credit, word for word, from another silly but more obscure work, “The Ether and its Vortices” by Carl Krafft (self-published, 1955). Such intellectual dishonesty is saddening but hardly unsurprising given what precedes it.

The best thing about this book is the picture of its author on the back of the jacket, showing his pyramid tent and his amazing pyramid trousers, very effective against foot-rot, no doubt.

Author Patrick Flanagan with his Pyramid Tent

More pyramidiocy: Great Pyramid Proof of God.

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Comments

Submitted by AnadonShaizar (not verified) on 22 Nov 2011 - 19:39 Permalink

Wow!! A site to hate authors, I guess haters have to have a place to hate; but this site also promots authors who hate on others for their beliefs and perspective on information that they have researched in the time when the books were written. All because they are different. These types of writings should be read with an open mind so as to see how the writings speak to your mind and if you find you don't like them that is fine. There is no need to bash somebody or to make fun at their appearance, or is that what we have all come to. If so we should all be careful because NONE of us believe or feel exactly the same and we could be next to be bashed. I was also wondering has anybody tried to build any of the items from the electrical diagrams? I think you might be surprised if you did.
Submitted by Alfred Armstrong on 22 Nov 2011 - 20:10 Permalink

I don't hate authors Anadon, I just try to see if what they write makes sense or not. In this particular case, would you defend the author's plagiarism that I pointed out?

It surely does no anyone any favours to suggest that keeping an open mind means not being critical of what someone writes if it happens to align with one's prejudices. That is the opposite of thinking for oneself: it's lazy and it encourages fraud and quackery.

Don't say shut up when you don't like what you hear, find a proper argument against the criticism. In this case, some actual evidence of the author's claims would be more convincing than yet another moan against sceptics like myself. I used to believe this sort of guff myself, many years ago, but reading widely has convinced me otherwise.

Submitted by Lisa (not verified) on 06 May 2011 - 03:51 Permalink

I am discarding this book from the library where I work this very moment. I came across this page while searching for "ventilated prose" because I wondered just what the heck he meant by this (and as mentioned on another website, I find the broken-up paragraphs rather hard to read visually, although I gather it's intended to improve comprehension in reading aloud). I was very amused to see that you had the exact same thought as I did about the picture on the back. Before reading this page, I swear, my exact thought was "author with his pyramid tent and his pyramid *pants*, yikes!"
Submitted by Alfred Armstrong on 06 May 2011 - 13:27 Permalink

Hi Lisa. Here's another site you might like if you don't know it already: http://awfullibrarybooks.net/

Submitted by FrancoisTremblay (not verified) on 23 May 2011 - 13:15 Permalink

I don't like that site, there's too much hypocrisy. But to each his own.
Submitted by Alfred Armstrong on 23 May 2011 - 13:22 Permalink

Not sure what you mean by hypocrisy, Francois. Care to elucidate?

Submitted by FrancoisTremblay (not verified) on 23 May 2011 - 13:50 Permalink

I've pointed out some instances in the past of books which they considered "weird" and how it was hypocrite of them to single out those topic and not other topics that people of the liberal persuasion believe in. It did not go over very well. Mainly it's just me being me. I complain about a lot of things.